I haven’t seen any instructions recently, but from a recently-ish install of FreeBSD 11 I remember it took even less steps, e.g., no need to set up a package repository, there is a graphical wifi selector.

I think he means the garish fonts (Comic Sans MS) and colours chosen by people who associate themselves with OpenBSD thoughtlines. I believe this is intentional, to prevent people from judging the content by appearance, but rather instead content. Also, you can then proceed to filter out people who only cared about the appearance.

Hmm, I suppose I can see why they think it’s a good idea, if this is really the reasoning. Suffice to say I completely disagree, at least with the degree to which they make their content illegible.

I mean, taking this page for example, it would be trivial to make this page less of an eyestrain: remove the body and link background colors, set the page width to ~800px, and the margins to auto. Voila: an actually readable website that doesn’t rely on pretty visuals to seem credible.

I suppose I just don’t understand why filtering out people who care about appearance is so important that they shoot themselves in the foot…or the eye, as it were.

Its funny to note, Simon Peyton Jones uses comic sans for all his presentations too. His reasoning:

This is a very funny question, why I use Comic Sans. So. All my talks use Comic Sans, and I frequently see little remarks, “Simon Peyton Jones, great talk about Haskell, but why did he use Comic Sans?” But nobody’s ever been able to tell me what’s wrong with it. I think it’s a nice, legible font, I like it. So until someone explains to me — I understand that it’s meant to be naff, but I don’t care about naff stuff, it’s meant to be able to read it. So if you’ve got some rational reasons why I should not, then I’ll listen to them. But just being unfashionable, I don’t care.

I’m not sure I’d agree it’s especially legible, if you include implied aspects of communication. I don’t care if it’s “bad” or “unfashionable”, but it does explicitly look like a kind of jokey, “fun” font, that implies you’re doing something lighthearted or jokey. Which is why it’s named Comic! That’s not necessarily always out of place in tech content— you could use it an xkcd-style cartoony introduction to a topic, or on the cover of a “For Dummies” style book. But the first few times I saw it in a completely unjokey “serious” presentation, it threw me off and made the entire talk difficult for me to follow, because throughout the talk I thought the jokes were going over my head and I was distracted trying to figure out what they were.

I’ve now seen it enough times that it doesn’t really distract me anymore, but only because I pattern-match “ah ok it’s a not a ‘real’ use of Comic Sans intended to be actually comic, it’s just that hipstery style that’s using it as an anti-fashion statement”.

I’ve read some studies that say Comic Sans is better for retention and possibly better for dyslexic people. And given some people actually like the font, I’ve also never seen a good argument against it other than “I don’t like it personally” or “its bad design” or “comic sans is a joke” or “comic sans use isn’t serious”.

If you be­lieve reader at­ten­tion is a valu­able re­source, then tools that help you con­serve that re­source are like­wise valu­able. Ty­pog­ra­phy is one of those tools.
Good ty­pog­ra­phy can help your reader de­vote less at­ten­tion to the me­chan­ics of read­ing and more at­ten­tion to your mes­sage. Con­versely, bad ty­pog­ra­phy can dis­tract your reader and un­der­mine your message.”

If others didn’t matter, why were they sharing or discussing it with them on non-project forums to begin with? Best to not half-ass an attempt to tell others about something great if it was worth an attempt to begin with.

Whereas MorphOS has just a handful doing thd whole thing. Its UX on desktop and part of site are beautiful. Works well enough for small, OS project. Probably other companies’ spending priorities rather than staff numbers are causing problems. ;)